It is an ongoing challenge in the jewelry industry to design and create jewelry with enhanced appearance. Gemstone arrangements are often created to enhance the appearance of the individual gems, for example, by altering their visual characteristics. This is often done by mounting complementary stones relative to a center stone. Such complementary stones may be arranged to reflect or refract light in a manner that further enhances the natural beauty of the center stone, as shown, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 7,127,916 B2 and U.S. Patent Application No. 2004/0237585 A1.
In recent years, color changing jewelry has become quite popular. Currently, color changing jewelry is often created by using color changing gemstones, such as alexandrite, iolite, sapphire or garnet, that exhibit color change when viewed in different lighting conditions, such as incandescent light, fluorescent light, sunny outdoors, rainy outdoors or shady outdoors. Such gemstones are rare and expensive. To lower the cost of such color changing jewelry, synthetic stones, such as synthetic corundum marketed as “Alexandrium” or the true synthetic alexandrite may be created in a lab. However, each of those stones changes color individually, which may limit their application in multiple stone settings.
Another method for creating color changing jewelry is to apply a coating to crystals, for example, Swarovski crystals are known to be finished with a coating called “vitrail” to change from green to gold to magenta to blue depending on the viewing angle of an observer. However, especially when using natural stones, it may not be desirable to apply a coating that hides the natural beauty of the stone. Additionally, the application of a coating is a relatively cost intensive extra step.
What is needed in the art is a setting for stone arrangements that change color when the viewing angle is changed independently from the lighting conditions and without application of a topcoat.